I’ve got to honest here; if the link had been “in the full”, I probably wouldn’t have clicked through – I would have reckoned on it being more mainstream-media-sanitised, “See it’s not all that bad, is it?” reporting but a) it was linked by Chris, and b) it was in TinyURL format. As it turned out, I clicked through into Episode 1, and was hooked.

Hometown Baghdad is an honest, no-frills, but all-too-brief glimpse into the everyday life of a group of everyday Iraqi twentysomethings who have had their lives interrupted by the war.

As with the previous episodes, the latest from Hometown Baghdad, “Symphony of Bullets“, is both moving and uplifting; moving because of the sense of what now passes for normal life in Baghdad; uplifting because despite the gunfire, humour still shines through.

I try not to blog about politics here – it’s too easy for things to dissolve into a “push me; shove you” argument – but maybe its time for the world’s media to pull out of Iraq, and let normal Iraqis tell their own stories. Perhaps one day, the coalition soldiers will simply have nothing left to do.In the meantime, if you subscribe to one new blog today, make it this one.

[tags]Iraq, Hometown Baghdad, video[/tags]

Talk about stating the obvious. 

Just go to your local pub and watch two couples at the same table. The women will be talking; they can talk at the same time, about different subjects and hold a conversation that they both understand.

After exhausting the subject of football, however, their partners will sit there not talking, but staring into space and you know they’re both wondering what the barmaid would look like in her underwear.

Does it really take a research grant to conclude that men and women are different? And more importantly, who cares?

[tags]language, communication, linguistics[/tags]

I bought the Opera browser for my DS Lite yesterday, and couldn’t get it to connect with my wireless AP at home, despite configuring Opera correctly and despite my router being on the compatible list. I looked at Draytek’s website and the firmware I was running was one version out of date, so I thought that upgrading to the latest version probably wouldn’t hurt. HA! About 75% through the upgrade, the upgrade applet threw out the ominous words, “Timeout. No Response from router”. Uh-oh.

To cut a long story short, it is totally fubar. I can ping any IP address and get a response back. My router now thinks it is the entire Internet… “Mmwuuahahaha!”. Bloody thing.

Anyway, in order to be productive today, I packed up my laptop, my phone, my DS Lite, assorted power adapters and batteries and came in search of a wireless hotspot. Living in a small market town in central England, I thought this would be a mammoth task. As it turned out, the first place I tried did have a hotspot. Not only did it have one, it was free to use!

So, here I am working in a small-town coffee shop and getting strange looks from some of the people who come in. I feel like I should be writing an article for Web Worker Daily! I’m guessing that if this was Silicon Valley, I’d get strange looks for sitting in a coffee shop without a laptop.

Two things strike me about my situation today. First, how isolated I felt the moment I realised that I had no way of connecting to the outside world from home. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t have TV, so I use my net connection for news and entertainment, as well as for work and communication. Second, how comfortable it felt packing up my mobile office and setting up in a coffee shop. It makes a nice change to working in my office at home. Now I know it’s here, this could become a regular habit.

I’d be interested to know if you’ve had similar experiences – were you forced to find somewhere else to work; is it a public place, and do you enjoy working there? Do your work habits change when you’re working in a coffee shop, rather than an office? Let me know.

[tags]web worker, wifi, hotspot, wireless, telecommuting, work from home, freelance, telework[/tags]

The boys had brought an XBox game they’d bought earlier that day and were dying to play it on my Xbox 360 console, so after dinner they took off to the living room to play at being James Bond while us four adults stayed in the dining room, to chat and finish drinking some rather fine South African grape juice…

After an hour or so, the boys came back through, bored of Bond and wanting to play another game. I didn’t fancy letting them loose on GR:AW or Oblivion, so I popped Kameo in for them. I thought I’d sit with them for a bit, in case they got stuck.

They’d never played Kameo before and so didn’t know the controls or the objective, but they figured it out, almost instinctively. They didn’t need to look at the booklet that comes in the game pack – they barely looked down at the controls to see how the buttons were laid out! When the pre-rendered stuff that explains what the buttons are for; or how to attack a certain problem came one, they just scrolled right past it, wanting to get on with the game play!

It was amazing to watch as they played the game, without any preconceived notions or expectations. If they got stuck, they tried something different, talking quietly with each other until they solved that particular problem.

When do we lose that, as adults? When do give up that ability to absorb and adapt without prejudice or expectation. As adults we want everything explained before we interact with it; we expect to know what to expect. I wish we could keep hold of our inner-kid for longer…

[tags]kids, children, learning, development, games, xbox360, xbox 360[/tags]

From the article:

Last month, 100 signatories, including neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield and author Philip Pullman, wrote a letter warning that today’s children face an unhealthy childhood, partly because they are spending too much time playing videogames rather than engaging in “real play”.

The minister is then quoted as saying:

“How do we reach into homes where games have become a substitute for parenting? You [the games industry] might say that this is not your responsibility, but if you say that I think that is the response of a nascent industry.”

So, rather than point the finger at lazy parents hardworking voters, it’s easier for the Govt to dodge the issue and say the games industry needs to do more. This nonsense is typical of today’s “victim mentality”.

Control over childrens’ time ultimately rests with a parent or guardian, not the games industry. How about the Govt do something revolutionary and make a plea to parents to do more in limiting the time their kids spend playing video games?